by Patrick Gale
She was a few yards away from the table now, slouching in a deck chair. She was working on the first baby bootee, which she had unpicked once a day for the last week. She had sworn on emerging from the bathroom two hours ago that she was swelling in the girth but Evan could still see nothing.
A coastal path ran from one end of the twisting Pembrokeshire seaboard to the other and seemed to be very popular with bearded hikers and women like nuns in mufti, fat crosses bouncing unabashed on their energetic breasts. Officially it ran straight through the point where Evan always pulled the table and on through where Madeleine liked to set up her deck chair. The two of them seemed to exude such a scent of virtuous toil, however, that every walker turned off into the field about a hundred yards away and took a long cut around the back of the cottage so as to leave them in peace. Mrs Penfarren had intimated to Evan yesterday that the villagers knew who Madeleine was and were ‘very proud’. He had passed this news on and she still chuckled to herself about it at intervals.
‘Innocent Victim of Papist Beast Clutched to Bosom of Chapel-goers’, she had mocked.
He glanced across at her briefly as she frowned at her needles. He hoped she was happy. She seemed so. At least, she seemed as happy as any chain-smoker might who had forced herself to give up. When she made this rash but noble decision as she was finishing her last packet on Haverfordwest station, Evan had offered to give up too to keep her company, but she had said that the least he could do was to keep going and to blow a bit of smoke around so as to give her a nostalgic sniff from time to time. His surprise at her sudden appearance on his train out of Barrowcester had seemed to be slightly less than hers at finding herself on it.
‘Oh God. I feel such a fool,’ she had panted, pink, sweat gleaming on her nose and cheeks after her rush.
‘Why? It’s … It’s lovely to see you. I was sorry not to have a chance to say goodbye.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘St Merrots.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Pembrokeshire. I’ve been lent a cottage on the cliffs for as long as I like. Where are you going?’
‘Well … Oh hell.’ She slung down her bag. ‘Thought you were going to London.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘Well, look Evan. Can I come too?’
‘Why ever not?’ he had started but she had gabbled on.
‘It’s just that … Oh I dunno. Don’t worry. I’m not eloping with you or anything but I’d like to go somewhere peaceful to have the baby. Anywhere but smelly old London or the Earthly Paradise.’
‘You’re going to have it?’
‘Of course I am. I was going to tell you yesterday but then I lost my temper and then … Mum told me about your manuscript. I started to write you a letter but I threw it away. You probably want to escape to peace and solitude. We’ll just chat a bit and I’ll get out at the next stop.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘I have been silly.’
‘Well be silly some more. Shall I go to the bar and get something to celebrate with?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Yes.’
‘Gin and tonic?’
‘I’d rather have a Newcastle Brown. Or maybe I should be drinking Guinness now. Oh bugger. Evan, do I want to be a mother?’
‘Yes.’
‘Any chance of a pork pie?’
Either she had read the diary or she was extremely intuitive. In the past weeks, as they had made tentative excursions into the village, as they had hollowed out a shamelessly comfortable routine for themselves, she had seemed fully aware of his feelings and of the slightly unresolved nature of their impromptu ménage. She did not discuss but she patted him on the shoulder from time to time or kissed him on the top of his head while he was working. Last night she had muttered something about ‘waiting a little bit to see’. She was proving wonderful company, mainly through her shared love of silence in the right places. She too was working on a book but she refused to let him see it yet. She worked on it in the afternoons while he was taking constitutional walks along the cliff paths and she worked on it far into the night. He could lie in bed watching the glow of light from her bedshelf across his open doorway and hear her sigh and turn pages. A lot of brown paper parcels had been arriving for her at the post office and seemed to be full of photocopies of erotic or downright disgusting drawings.
When Evan telephoned Jeremy to say that he had arrived safely and why and how he was not alone, his agent could hardly believe his luck. Apparently she had become a potent fantasy figure on the literary agency lunch circuit and all the Jeremies had been praying that she would wander into their offices and asked to be represented. Watching her lying on her back on the grass outside to watch the sunset, Evan had told his agent that she seemed to be working on something faintly scandalous and that he’d let him know when she’d finished whatever it was so that he could pounce.
He threw down his pen and stretched, tipping back his chair on the daisy-flecked turf. Madeleine let her busy hands sink to her lap and looked across to him. She smiled, the sun in her unbrushed hair.
‘How’s it coming on?’ she asked.
‘Great. I think. A bit odd but it’s bound to be as it’s new. How’s the bootee?’
‘Sod off. The wool’s gone all grey. I think, when the Thing arrives, I shall dress it all in black with maybe some rubber accessories.’
‘I’m sure if you let slip to Mrs Rees, she’d have all the charitable women of St Merrots knitting for you.’
‘I’m not a charity. Anyway I enjoy knitting; it’s just a long time since I last had a go.’
‘You never give up, do you?’
‘No. The meddlesome priest said it was part of my “bulldog charm”.’
Evan flipped his exercise book shut and watched a distant fishing boat drift.
‘How does a spot of cold ravioli grab you?’ he asked.
‘I thought we were going to start being healthy for the Thing’s sake.’
‘We are. Eventually. Do you feel like chopping up vegetables?’
‘Not a lot,’ she confessed.
‘I’ll get the tin opener.’
‘No. My turn,’ she said, lurching upright with a grunt and tossing the knitting disgustedly into the chair behind her. As she passed him she stopped to rest a hand on his shoulder. ‘Present for you,’ she said and solemnly laid a handkerchief before him. It was neatly ironed and white with a little F and a soldier embroidered in one corner.
‘Why thank you,’ he said, nonplussed but charmed. He turned round. ‘What’s the F stand for? Fitzpatrick?’
‘No,’ she said quietly and walked into the cottage.
‘Fornicators?’ he shouted.
‘No,’ she called back, clinking plates.
‘Friends?’ he asked, too quietly for her to hear. He sighed and opened his exercise book again. He scanned the paragraph he had just finished and made a rapid improvement. Towards a New Mythology had been donated to the waiting room on Haverfordwest Station and Evan had asked Jeremy to find him no more reviewing work until further notice. In his late forties and to Jeremy’s thinly-veiled alarm, he had embarked on his first novel. Despite the letter that had come from Dawn Harper his present idyll was overshadowed by dreams that crept up on him nightly; dreams in which the corpse of a wild-haired child rose up through bubbling soil in a rain-churned flower bed. He had never told, would never speak of what he had seen in Mercy Merluza’s garden, but he hoped that by writing a narrative that offered an explanation for it he might rid his nights of the child. Sometimes, when there was a wind to lift a spray off the waves, salt splashes landed on the paper and made the ink run.
Have you read…?
Notes From An Exhibition
Patrick Gale
When troubled artist Rachel Kelly dies painting obsessively in her attic studio in Penzance, her saintly husband and adult children have more than the usual mess to clear up. She leaves behind an extraordinary and acclaimed body of work – but she also leaves a legacy of secrets
and emotional damage it will take months to unravel.
A wondrous, monstrous creature, she exerts a power that outlives her. To her children she is both curse and blessing, though they all in one way or another reap her whirlwind, inheriting her waywardness, her power of loving – and her demons…Only their father’s Quaker gifts of stillness and resilience give them any chance of withstanding her destructive influence and the suspicion that they came a poor second to the creation of her art.
The reader becomes a detective, piecing together the clues of a life – as artist, lover, mother, wife and patient – which takes them from contemporary Penzance to 1960s Toronto to St Ives in the 1970s. What emerges is a story of enduring love, and of a family which weathers tragedy, mental illness and the intolerable strain of living with genius.
Patrick Gale’s latest novel shines with intelligence, humour and tenderness.
Buy the ebook here
A Perfectly Good Man
Patrick Gale
‘Do you need me to pray for you now for a specific reason?’
‘I’m going to die.’
We’re all going to die. Does dying frighten you?’
‘I mean I’m going to kill myself.
When 20–year–old Lenny Barnes, paralysed in a rugby accident, commits suicide in the presence of Barnaby Johnson, the much–loved priest of a West Cornwall parish, the tragedy’s reverberations open up the fault–lines between Barnaby and his nearest and dearest. The personal stories of his wife, children and lover illuminate Barnaby’s ostensibly happy life, and the gulfs of unspoken sadness that separate them all. Across this web of relations scuttles Barnaby’s repellent nemesis – a man as wicked as his prey is virtuous.
Returning us to the rugged Cornish landscape of Notes from an Exhibition, Patrick Gale lays bare the lives and the thoughts of a whole community and asks us: what does it mean to be good?
Buy the ebook here
The Whole Day Through
Patrick Gale
When forty–something Laura Lewis is obliged to abandon a life of stylish independence in Paris to care for her elderly mother in Winchester, it seems all romantic opportunities have gone up in smoke. Then she runs into Ben, the great love of her student days – and, as she only now dares admit, the emotional touchstone against which she has judged every man since. She’s cautious – and he’s married – but they can’t deny that feelings still exist between them.
Are they brave enough to take the second chance at the lasting happiness that fate has offered them? Or will they be defeated by the need to do what seems to be the right thing?
Taking its structure from the events of a single summer’s day, The Whole Day Through is a bittersweet love story, shot through with an understanding of mortality, memory and the difficulty of being good. In it, Patrick Gale writes with scrupulous candour about the tests of love: the regrets and the triumphs, and the melancholy of failing.
The Whole Day Through is vintage Gale, displaying the same combination of wit, tenderness and acute psychological observation as his Richard & Judy bestseller Notes From an Exhibition.
Buy the ebook here
Facts of Life
Patrick Gale
A young composer, Edward Pepper, is exiled from his native Germany by the war, struck down with TB, and left to languish in an isolation hospital. But then he falls in love with his doctor, Sally Banks, and his world is transformed. They set up home in a bizarre dodecahedral folly, The Roundel – a potent place, which grows in significance as it bears witness to their family’s tragedies and joys. The years pass, and Edward watches from this sanctuary as both his grandchildren, Jamie and Alison, fall prey to the charms of Sam, an enigmatic builder, and have to come to terms with some of the tougher facts of life.
Buy the ebook here
Rough Music
Patrick Gale
Julian is enjoying the perfect childhood holiday on a Cornish beach when glamorous American cousins arrive unexpectedly to swell the party. Emotions soon run high and events spiral out of control, with tragic consequences. Though he has been brought up in the forbidding shadow of the prison his father runs, and though his parents are neither as normal nor as happy as he supposes, Julian’s world view is the sunnily selfish, accepting one of boyhood. It is only when he becomes a man – seemingly at ease with love, with his sexuality, with his ghosts – that the traumatic effects of that distant summer rise up to challenge his defiant assertion that he is happy and always has been.
This is a remarkable, wholly recognizable story of the lies which adults tell, and of the little acts of treason which a child can commit, a compassionate portrayal of the merciful tricks of memory and the courage with which we continue to assert our belief in love and happiness.
Buy the ebook here
About the Author
Patrick Gale was born on the Isle of Wight in 1962. He spent his infancy in Wandsworth Prison, which his father governed, then grew up in Winchester. He now lives on a farm near Land’s End.
Praise
‘Gale is intoxicated with words and feeds upon them with a kind of manic relish … The sheer funniness of Facing the Tank made me laugh out loud. Its optimism delighted me.’
Sunday Times
‘Patrick Gale writes with great zest. I kept on reading because I was perpetually astonished to find what Mr Gale had thought up next.’
Sunday Telegraph
‘The first thing that catches the attention about Patrick Gale is a sardonic eye, an engagingly leery way of looking at life, or the half-life he has chosen as his base in Facing the Tank. It’s as though Cold Comfort Farm had called in the interior decorators.’
Guardian
‘Gale has a fondness for his characters and a deep tolerance of their foibles which shines through his writing. Facing the Tank is a potent brew … Assured and immensely enjoyable.’
Gay Times
‘Gale has carried off yet another tour de force. The plot ricochets between the dozens of richly drawn characters, and one of the many reasons to devour this novel at one go is that it will make it easier to keep track. Some other reasons are that this book is a delightful read. If E.F. Benson, Iris Murdoch and Fay Weldon were to produce a story in some mad collusion, the result might be something like this.’
Publishers Weekly
‘If you can imagine a cross of Barchester Towers and Rosemary’s Baby as written by Muriel Spark, you may have some idea of what you’ll be facing with Facing the Tank.’
Washington Post
Also by the Author
Also by Patrick Gale
THE AERODYNAMICS OF PORK
KANSAS IN AUGUST
EASE
LITTLE BITS OF BABY
THE CAT SANCTUARY
CAESAR’S WIFE (NOVELLA)
THE FACTS OF LIFE
DANGEROUS PLEASURES (STORIES)
TREE SURGERY FOR BEGINNERS
ROUGH MUSIC
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East – 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W 1A8, Canada
www.harpercollins.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
www.harpercollins.com
r />